movable IP from VM to VM ("elastic IP")

Admin Response

Hey All,
Floating IPs has gone live today. Head over to our blog (https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/floating-ips-start-architecting-your-applications-for-high-availability/) and check out the community tutorials (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tags/high-availability?type=tutorials) to get started.

build new server to replace old server... would i rather a) swap the IP from the old to the new server for (near instant) happiness or b) go through DNS rigamorole as noted above _and_ have to keep both running for days to account for ISPs who ignore low TTLs?

You can resize the server and we are just about finished with the code updates to the resize that also does a migrate onto a new hypervisor and in every resize your IP would be preserved.

If you want to add one more layer to this you can also setup nginx on a small server and have it act as a reverse proxy then you have full control over which domain to point to which server.

This way you can have 50 websites on a single server and if one of them grows large you can use nginx to reverse proxy that to a different server moving it to it's own virtual server which is larger without the need to contact the customer for any DNS updates.

In regards to your response Moisey, I would rather have the floating IP than a load balancing application, I have uses to be running my own HA proxy (or similar proxy applications) that do load balancing.

i think so too: a load balancing layer is imho no replacement for elastic ips.

my preferred solution would be being able to re-route an elastic ip to any of my droplets via an api request (like aws or hetzner).
second choice would be a solution where an elastic ip could be brought up on any of my droplets (like linode).

Right now, we're taking the risk of using DO without this feature - when the master nginx goes down, we process failover, write a ticket to move the IP and hope it be executed by DO staff in a few minutes in the middle of Christmas dinner. (seriously, gaming apps have high traffic in those seasons...)

So far DO staff is responsive and good, and it sure mitigates my worries, but this feature would *remove* my worries.

Moisey, yes. There are use cases where having an IP address that can be assigned to specific instances is desirable.

Think about hosting a DNS server farm. For this use case, each authoritative name server needs to have a fixed IP address. In case of a failure or rebuild, the persistent IP address could be applied to another (replacement? upgraded? reconfigured?) server quickly.

Your domain registrar records would remain unchanged, yet you would be able to replace / relocate servers transparently without having to modify hundreds of thousands of DNS zone delegations.